Thursday, June 25, 2015

Politix Update: They're Making News Without Even (Officially) Running

IS KASICH GOING UP AND BUSH COMING DOWN?

Call him the Panic Candidate.

Even though Ohio Governor John
Kasich has not formally announced that he's joining the already crowded
Republican presidential field, he seems to be everywhere except back
home these days. That is everywhere there might be potential donors who
believe this swing state governor may just be the guy to rally what's
left of the GOP's moderate base as an alternative to the floundering
candidacy of Jeb Bush.

The
mainstream media had all but handed Bush the nomination a few short
months ago on the strength of his prodigious fund raising, close ties to
party moderates, and the belief that an establishment-oriented
candidate like himself had the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton.
But as I wrote in a recent Politix Update, the media pretty much got it wrong: Bush
has many more challengers for the nomination than it was
presumed there would be, while fellow Floridian Marco Rubio is running
even if Mitt Romney is not, and while he may be establishment oriented
his party is increasingly less so. He also has run a lackluster
campaign and has not figured out how to deal with the deep antipathy
with
which many Republicans view his big brother for sullying the party
brand, a reality that in the end may be impossible to overcome.

Kasich's big problem is that he is getting in late, if he gets in at all. And while his moderate bona fides will
appeal to voters outside the GOP's increasingly white and right wing
base, and he served two terms in Congress, just because he's a lot like
Jeb Bush on policy issues doesn't mean he can pre-empt him by benefiting
from the panic felt by party moderates who believe the Bush campaign
has run out of steam.

There's also his tacit support of the Affordable Care Act by expanding
Medicaid coverage for low-income adults in Ohio two years ago. This
will alienate him from the Republicans nationally who believe that
access to affordable health care is a socialist evil, or something, as
well as distance him from the many presidential wannabes who have either
voted to repeal Obamacare or vociferously oppose it. His
allies counter that Kasich won reelection last year with 64 percent of
the vote in part because of what they call a courageous economic and
moral stand for the poor.

Nor
does a Kasich bid mean that conservative candidates like Rubio are
going to roll over. Conservatives believe, naively in my view, that
this is their year to take back the White House after the disappointing
showings by moderates John McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012.

A key to whether Kasich runs is if he can corral the support of Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon and Fox News owner who has an oversized voice in Republican Party affairs. Politico notes that Murdoch and Kasich, who was a Fox News
host for six years, are close friends and Kasich has gotten Murdoch to
contribute lavishly to Republican causes in the past. So how about his
own cause?

In any event, Kasich seems to be making points, in part because of his reputation for not mincing words.

"That
was more candor in 30 minutes than I've heard in three hours of
listening to other
politicians talk," said Wes Climer, chairman of the York County (S.C.)
Republican Party, after hosting
a Kasich appearance. And at an appearance before big donors in Southern
California, one of them told Kasich that she disagreed with the
governor's decision to expand Medicaid coverage. "I don't know about
you, lady," he fired back, "But when I get to the pearly gates, I'm
going to have to answer for what I've done for the poor."

ENTER THE BIDENISTAS

Call him the Phantom Candidate.

Vice
President Biden has not said he will be running for president, but
neither has he ruled it out, which gives hope to Democrats -- at this
point a small handful, anyway -- who do not much care for presumptive
nominee Hillary Clinton and believe Biden would be the best Democrat to
carry on the legacy of Barack Obama.

Will Pierce, an Army Reserve
captain who served in Iraq, chairs the Draft Biden movement, which he
runs out of a small office in Chicago. He says the movement has
collected 81,000 petition signatures, is fundraising and hopes to lure
Biden into the race after a series of campaign rallies.

"We’re
bringing on more people. We just want to show the vice president the
support he has," says Pierce. "When and if he
gets into the race, he'll have a foundation. He'll have some endorsers.
He'll have a grass-roots organization ready to go."

In the
unlikely event Biden decided to run, that almost certainly would be
predicated on Clinton having to withdraw from the race for, say, health
reasons. If Biden was then nominated -- and the possibility that he
would beat whomever the Republicans threw at him -- he would be 77 at
the end of a first term, making him the oldest of any president in
history. That alone would seem to rule against run. Meanwhile, Biden
has been in Washington for 42 years and, one would think, is pretty
damned tired of life in the public eye.

Add to that the
recent death of his son, Beau, to brain cancer at age 48 and it's
difficult to see Biden doing anything other than going home to tiny
Delaware after a outsized career.

WATCH YOUR BACKS, GOP GOVERNORS

So
you're a Republican governor but your ambitions are higher. Much
higher -- liking running for president. So at this stage of the game,
your focus is on the early primary states more than your own, and while
your policy decisions might go over well among the Republican burghers
of Iowa or New Hampshire, members of your own party are in revolt back
home.

It has happened to Chris Christie in New Jersey and Bobby
Jindal in Louisiana, and now Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is feeling
the slings and arrows of Republican legislators over his repeated
demands to do more with less, like pay for $1.3 billion in bridge and
road repairs without raising taxes. While this so-called fiscal
responsibility may play well with conservatives nationally, what Walker
really wants to do is borrow that $1.3 billion, which his legislative
colleagues say is irresponsible.

Campaigning in Iowa and elsewhere, Walker boasts of lowering taxes by $2 billion
and lowering unemployment, but he does not mention that Wisconsin ranked 35th in job growth in the
nation during his first term, and that it trails its upper Midwest neighbors.

The
no-new-taxes pledge is indeed a winner out on the hustings, but
Wisconsin legislators are more interested in bridges that don't fall
down and roads that don't fall apart. Kinda like Kansas, where Governor
Sam Brownback's anti-tax extremism has won him applause among
conservatives but infuriated legislators and plunged the state into a
fiscal crisis. And in the long run destroyed any chance of Brownback
being taken seriously as presidential material.

Politix Update
is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen,
for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.
Click here for an index of previous Politix Updates.

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About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.